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He had no wish to go back to the old times when servants slept in cubby-holes, when children were abused and terrified with prospects of a fiery hell, when sanitation was in its infancy, and science was considered blasphemous. But neither did he wish to deliver Wintersmoon up to the first ignorant band of labourers who came to demand it. Nor did he believe that the traditions and heritage of England were so much discarded offal. He was alone, as always. He seemed to fit in nowhere at all.

He had always read a good deal but in a desultory fashion, picking up what came his way. Now his love for England directed all his reading energy—Chaucer and Spenser, Shakespeare of course, Marlowe, and Beaumont and Fletcher, The Spectator, and Swift and Sterne, Fielding and Richardson, Jane Austen, and then all the Victorians, Macaulay, Carlyle, Froude, Peacock, Landor, Wuthering Heights and Henry Kingsley, Hardy and Meredith, and so to the moderns. And the poets—Wordsworth first and best, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, Swinburne and Browning, Tennyson and Rossetti—all of them for the things about England that they could give him. But his great discovery was the accidental finding in the library at Wintersmoon a volume of John Clare. At that time in 1919 Clare was a forgotten poet. In the following years, thanks to the generous enthusiasms of Edmund Blunden, he was rediscovered and beautifully reissued, but to Wildherne that chance finding of a third edition of the Poems descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery seemed a miracle. He devoured the book, discovered then that no one had ever heard of Clare, and further that no one ever found the poems anything but trivial and commonplace. Even his father failed him here.